Cape May Diaries
41- A call to the sea?
We did not shy away from the a whale watch trip by the unfortunate news during the summer, but rather by reports of rough seas and wet weather – as yet another storm made its way north.
We had intended to take our first tour during our trip this year more or less to guarantee a sighting of a whale or dolphin.
Rain had plagued us on previous trips, though only twice over sixteen years had the weather dampened our spirits and our clothing to threaten our vacations.
More than cold, the wet made for miserable walking. One year we got both, making us literal prisoners of our hotel.
With 2005 setting a record for hurricanes, we came with ill expectations, suspecting the predicted heavy rains due during our visit would be followed by a frost. So when we arrived on the Thursday before Columbus Day to find Cape May still relatively dry, we crammed in as much as we could of our planned outdoor events as possible, leaving indoor events for those days when we knew we could not walk unmolested by rain.
Unfortunately, we immediately gave up on the idea of sailing believing the sea was already too violent for my landlubber stomach to handle. Whale watching, we said, would have to wait until our next trip.
Had we known that the rain would hold off until Saturday, we might have crammed a trip into the Friday schedule of outdoor events we took up before the deluge.
As the grandson of a boat builder, I knew better than to take any comfort from the incredible red dawn that greeted us on Friday morning – the old sailors rhyme running wild in my head about the need to take warning. Even as I stood with camera tripod on the beach snapping off post-card like photographs of that amazing sunrise, images of my 1980 disaster off the coast of Atlantic City stirred in me, when while trying to impress a girlfriend’s father I took up the challenge of fishing on a small boat – most of my breakfast surging with each bump of the boat.
Even as we strolled down the promenade a short time later for breakfast at George’s, I eyed the sea with foul anticipation, while my calmer wife took count of the Monarch butterflies and commented a photograph in one of the local newspapers she had seen the previous day showing clusters so thick we might have picked them like fruit. Yet all we could find during our first walk was a handful of stragglers who had apparently missed the last flight to Mexico their brethren had taken.
Since dolphins, whales and Monarchs had become omens of our year to come and we were unlikely to see any because of the increasingly dismal weather, I stroke the asphalt promenade with a mood that grew darker with every step, as if the storm clouds I expected to ruin the vacation already formed inside my head.
Breakfast at George’s lightened the mood a little, since we did not have to stand outside in a line waiting for a table, telling us that we had arrived prior to the usual Columbus Day invasion and could at least expect smooth sails through whatever tour we decided to take that day.
This theory was supported by the fact that the traffic lights along Beach Drive still blinked yellow and by the fact that traffic was still mostly populated by porcupine-like pickup trucks loaded with fishing pole quills headed for the end of Beach Drive where they intended to take advantage of whatever game the sea managed to churn up.
A pang of jealousy gripped me.
With so many hours to fill waiting for a bite and nothing better to do than stare out at the sea, those fisherman were bound to catch a glimpse of the dolphin or whales we would miss with our more casual (yet longing) glances.
I had come to call dolphins “angels of the sea” and they remained fixed in my mind even as we strolled along the beach later as heavier and heavier storm clouds hung over us. My mind was already casting ahead to our new year wondering about what fate or fortune would reel in for us: boot or prize fish, when my wife Sharon gave a cry and pointed towards the gray waves out of which the snouts and fins of dolphins appeared, not one, but scores, rising and falling with the waves, dipping down into the depths of the sea for the same fish the fishermen sought, needed no rod or reel to pull in their catch, needing no signs or omens to tell them if the year would be good or bad.
I did not hear their cries, only those of the flock of sea gulls that traveled in their wake, taking what the dolphins missed.
So intently did we stare out at the show the dolphins put on that we did not mark the passage of time, the tick of the clocks that ruled our lives up north no longer mattering to us as much as the vision and the movement and the gray sky the dolphins used as their backdrop. We did not notice the ground around us changing color as the sand grew wet, from rain rather than waves, and how like the sand, our clothing grew moister with each moment. None of that mattered. We didn’t even think of omens or what seeing the dolphins meant, devoid of old sailors’ myths, devoid of thought. I felt the wind, smelled the salt, felt the chill kiss of life daily routine had robbed from us. Later, as the last of the dolphins faded from sight, we realized we had stood there staring for more than an hour and that while no deluge besieged us, a steady drizzle had laid into us, wetting our hair and clothing, and making our shoes squish as we finally turned for the soggy sand-filled trek back to our hotel to change.